Joan Grant

Joan Marshall was born 12 April 1907, at London, England, daughter of John Frederick Marshall and Blanche Emily Hughes. Joan Grant's father was of dual US-British nationality – a real tennis player who won his place in the semi-finals of the World Championship for each country and thus needed to play against himself. A serious amateur entomologist, he also carried out at his own expense valuable pioneering work on the Anopheles mosquito for which purpose he had installed a full research unit on Hayling Island.

Joan Grant spent her early years on Hayling Island in Hampshire. She was a lively, determined girl and was trained in ballet, until an injury ended the pursuit. She learned tennis, of course, and as a young woman won the Hampshire Ladies Golf finals – having never before played golf! She learned aspects of science by assisting her father with his entolmological research. H.G. Wells was a friend of Joan's father who became an admirer and sort of mentor to Joan. Joan's mother was given to second-sight visions. Joan herself experienced parapsychological phenomena from young girlhood, which sensitivity was recognized not only by herself but by friends, who often felt it was eerie.

Joan married Leslie Grant on 30 November 1927. She married Charles Beatty, 14 March 1940. Beatty was also a writer, first manager of the Montague Motor Museum in Beaulieu and one of the first announcers on Radio Luxembourg and transcribed some of Joan Grant's earlier books from a wire voice recorder. She married Denys Kelsey on 1 September 1960.

Her first and most famous novel was Winged Pharaoh (1937). Grant shot to unexpected fame upon publication. The New York Times hailed it as "A book of fine idealism, deep compassion and a spiritual quality pure and bright as flame'" a sentiment echoed in countless reviews the world over. What her readers did not officially know for almost another twenty years, was that Joan claimed to have recalled the events in Winged Pharaoh while in a hypnotic or trance-like state, dictating piecemeal the lifetime that she believed herself to have lived. The book is still considered a cult classic by believers in the New Age religion. It was followed by other historical fantasies, or as Grant called them, "Far Memory books," or "previous life autobiographies". This book was initially accepted as a novel; Grant's first husband was a barrister and Egyptologist who spent many years prior to World War II working on excavations in Egypt, and as Joan accompanied him on some of these expeditions she was quite aware of many facets of Egyptian history. "Winged Pharaoh" was claimed by some to in fact be a re-incarnationist autobiography. Historians claimed that the calendar used in the book had never existed and also that there was no evidence whatsoever for the existence of an avenue of trees referred to in the book. After World War II a text was found Template:Where? who? which when translated proved to be the calendar referred to by Grant in the 1937 book.

Grant believed she had been reincarnated at least forty times and that her far memory of past lives provided her the base material for her historical novels. She strove to disabuse herself and her readers of preconceptions, to eschew what she called 'group-think'. She was not interested in blind faith and blind belief, but in what could be perceived as true by the five senses. She claimed to have an unusual gift of "far memory" – the ability to remember previous lives, and something she referred to as "sensory awareness". She said that she experienced many realities that are not available to most people.

A collection of previously unknown writings by Grant was published as Speaking from the Heart: Ethics, Reincarnation & What it Means to Be Human in 2007 by Overlook Press in the United States and Duckworth Press in the UK. It was edited by her granddaughter Nicola Bennett, with anthologist Jane Lahr and Joan's closest friend Sophia Rosoff. The book contains poetry, essays and a series of lectures she gave at Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach. She had a reputation for talking and writing with clear certainty about her belief in other realities, past lives, and death. She said that for her, the veil between the "worlds" simply did not exist.

With her third husband, Denys Kelsey, she wrote Many Lifetimes, in which she explained how she supposedly remembered her own and others' past lives.

She also wrote several children's books which contain stories she claimed she was told in past lives. Some of her books were published under the names Joan M. Grant and Joan Marshall Grant.

Her books have been translated and published in many languages.